The Melancholy of Resistance (27 page)

love.
She would never have thought that this wonderful realm existed at all, that she’d get to know quite so many ‘delightful manoeuvres in that delicious battle’ or that the ‘swell of the rising tide’ in her heart could be so liberatingly intoxicating, though the key that unlocked the hidden recesses of her being—she shut her eyes and blushed all over again as she confessed it—lay in the colonel’s hands. In the figure of her colonel, whom she addressed, ‘quite naturally’ by this time, as Peter, in whose strong arms she had suffered ecstasy some eight times, and who with his own hands had sealed this jar of preserves with cellophane and a rubber band, she had found someone with whom she could arrange the town’s future but at the same time discuss the situation in general. What kind of country was this, they asked in complete agreement (and now that she recalled it, it was seven times), that required a military tribunal, an officer with absolute authority and a full
military unit
at his disposal to march to and fro in order to preserve local law and order? What kind of country was it where soldiers were employed as firemen to flit here and there and put out the fiddling flames started by a few emboldened hooligans? ‘Believe me, my dear Tunde,’ the colonel grumbled again, ‘I can hardly bear to look at the single tank you saw in the main square, I’m so ashamed of it! I drag it about with me like the old ruffian with the cigar does his whale. I show it to give people a fright, for apart from one or two training exercises I can’t remember a single occasion when I’ve fired the thing, and I didn’t set out with the idea of running a circus but to be a soldier and, naturally, I want to fire it!’ ‘Then fire it, Peter … !’ she replied flirtatiously, and he did, seven times, one after another, for every agreement and command could wait till the next day, it was the present that interested them now, the inexhaustible joy of being together, in love; then, at dawn, he bade her farewell in front of the house, and as he got into the waiting Jeep they said those words that wanted to say so much more (‘Tünde!’ ‘Peter!’) and he shouted out the promise she had not forgotten as he was leaving in the still dim light from the window of the disappearing Jeep: ‘I’ll call round whenever I can!’ No one who knew her at all—she rose from the writing desk—could say that she had ever lacked the strength, but the energy with which she attacked the task of planning after that decisive night surprised even her, and within fourteen days she had not only ‘swept away the old and established the new’ but on further ‘continuous surges of energy’ she had earned local people’s praise and support, local people who, according to all the evidence, had finally come to recognize that it was ‘better to burn in a fever of activity than to put your slippers on and hide your head in the pillows’, people who, since she had gained their confidence, no longer con-de-scend-ed to her, but on the contrary—she stepped over to the window, her hands behind her back—‘looked up’ to her. The fact was—she scanned the street from one end to the other—she had found herself in a situation where whatever she did met with immediate success, everything came easily and naturally to hand, and the entire ‘assumption of power’ was no more than child’s play: all she had to do was to reap the fruit of her labours. The first week had been spent chiefly in ‘picking up the threads’, that is to say in carefully watching whether the fates of the more prominent witnesses and ‘the analysis and investigation of the vandalism’ were really proceeding according to plan, or rather, accorded to the elements of the account she had given that memorable day in the council chamber, and noting with amazement how everything was falling perfectly into place, how every judgement, human or divine, that affected those who had taken part seemed, almost supernaturally, to support her position. The circus had done its valuable work, because, even if The Prince and his factotum had not yet been caught, the director (‘the old cigar-smoking ruffian’ as Peter referred to him) had been deported, the whale removed and the prison was stuffed with ‘various aiders, abetters and accomplices’, and, so that local events should not trigger even minor incidents in the surrounding area, they cleverly spread the rumour that the company had been working under the instruction of foreign intelligence agencies. The chief of police, at least until his transfer to Vas County, had been assigned for three months to an alcohol-dependency institution somewhere out in the sticks and his two boys placed in a children’s home, and, in the meantime, the powers of the old mayor—who was allowed to keep his title—had been transferred to his newly appointed secretary. Valuska, who hadn’t got very far that ‘epoch-making morning’ (‘epoch-making’ for him to be sure), if only because he had stopped to ask directions of a policeman the previous night, had been sectioned ‘for life, for all practical purposes’ in a secure ward of the town’s mental asylum. Harrer had been appointed to the town hall staff as a temporary secretarial assistant until some permanent post could be found for him, and, to cap it all, the town had been advanced a considerable amount of credit for ‘development’. That was just the first week—Mrs Eszter cracked her knuckles behind her back—by the second her tidy yard and orderly house movement had ‘got up a real head of steam’, so that within five days of ‘the terrible riot’, shops had opened and their shelves were beginning to show ‘signs of commercial activity’; the whole population was going about its business and had continued to do so; all the administrative departments were up and functioning, with the old staff, it is true, but with a new spirit; there was teaching in the schools, telephone communications had improved, fuel was available once more so that traffic could get moving again, albeit in a much reduced but still valuable fashion, trains were running quite well in the circumstances, the streets were fully lit at night and there was plenty of wood and coal to keep the fires burning; in other words, the transfusion had been successful, the town was breathing again and she—she moved her neck gently to refresh herself—was standing at the apex of it all. There was no time to ponder how things might proceed from here, for at that moment her hitherto uninterrupted reflections were brought to an abrupt end by a knock on the door, so she returned to her desk, hid the preserve jar, adjusted her chair, cleared her throat and crossed her legs. Then, once she had pronounced a loud and resonant ‘Come in!’ Harrer entered, shut the door behind him, took a step towards the desk, stepped back again, hesitated, crossed his hands in front of his lap and, in his usual shifty way, cast sharp glances here and there to see whether anything important had happened in the interval between his knocking and the invitation to enter. He was bringing news, he said, ‘concerning the matter’ with which the good lady had entrusted him last Monday: he had at last found a man who, in his opinion, might be accepted into the new police force at a low level, in that he satisfied both requirements, being, on the one hand, local, and on the other—Harrer blinked—having already shown his ‘suitability on a specific occasion’; and, since there was plenty of time left before the funeral he had brought him straight here from the Nile public house, and because he had assured him that anything that might be said would remain confidential, behind closed doors, the ‘person in question’ was willing to put himself ‘to the test’, and therefore, Harrer suggested, they might conduct the interview right here and now. ‘Now, perhaps,’ the secretary retorted, ‘but not here!’ then, after a moment’s thought, she gave Harrer a real dressing down for not being careful enough, asking him finally what he was doing in the Nile when his place should have been beside her from morning till night, and, dismissing his excuses, explained to him that half an hour from now, not a minute earlier or later, he should appear together with the ‘person in question’ at the house in Wenckheim Avenue. Harrer didn’t dare say anything, just gave a nod to signify he understood, and another in response to the parting remark, ‘… and the secretarial car should be waiting in front of the house at a quarter past twelve!’ then slipped out while Mrs Eszter, with a careworn expression on her face, made a note to herself that unfortunately she must get used to the fact that ‘someone in her position cannot relax for a minute’. But she did not seriously fear that her splendidly industrious, but impulsive right-hand man (‘you have to watch him or he gallops off on some daft idea …’), who had to be kept on a tight leash, had entirely spoilt what had promised to be a quiet morning of ‘the enjoyment of newly gained power’, for as soon as she left the office and stepped through the doors of the town hall in her simple leather coat, tens if not hundreds of people turned immediately to her, and once she reached Árpád Street ‘a veritable guard of honour’ might have been formed of the citizens conscientiously labouring in front of their houses. Everyone was hard at work: grandfathers, grandmothers, men, women, large and small, thin and fat, were all busy with pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows clearing up the ice-bound rubbish on the pavement and the areas designated for them in front of their gates, clearly going at it with ‘great relish’. Each little group, as soon as she reached them, stopped work for a moment, downed pickaxe, spade and wheelbarrow, greeted her with an occasional cheerful, ‘Good day!’ or, ‘Taking the air, are we?’ and, since it was an open secret that she was the president of the movement’s evaluation committee, set to work again even more heartily than before, if that was possible. Once or twice she heard voices some way ahead of her announcing, ‘Here comes our secretary!’ and there was no reason for her to be embarrassed by the fact that her heart was thumping proudly halfway down Árpád Street; she continued at a brisk pace, moving past them with a little wave here and there, though once these greetings started showering down on her with ever more vehemence towards the end of the street, she couldn’t help but relax her well-known grim expression—grim because she carried so much expectation and responsibility on her shoulders!—and almost smile. Had she not repeated a hundred times in the last fortnight that it was best to draw a veil over what had passed, because it was only ‘by considering “what should be” and “what we want” that we get from square one to square two’; no, she had never ceased filling their ears with that ‘clarion call’, but now, for the first time, following this rewarding display of confidence, she herself considered taking that advice, thinking, ‘Yes, let’s draw a veil over that,’ but as she turned the corner of the avenue she reminded herself, ‘What was I to you, or you to me?’ The masses cannot achieve anything without a leader, but without their confidence—she opened the gate to the house—the leader is impotent, and these particular masses were ‘not at all such bad material’ though, she immediately added, she herself ‘was no ordinary leader’. We shall be all right, ladies and gentlemen, she reflected with satisfaction as she thought of the people in Árpád Street, and later, once there had been some progress, ‘the leash need not be so tight, nor the secretary so demanding’, since, in the last analysis, there was nothing more she herself wanted, as everything she desired—her feet rang down the floor of the hall—
was hers already.
She had recovered what had been taken from her and gained all she had hoped for, since power, indeed the
supreme
power, was in her hands, and her ‘crowning achievement’ had, she might say, as she entered the drawing room in a deeply moved state of mind, ‘literally’ fallen into her lap. Her thoughts were running on a little as they did in the office, or just because they tended to do so anyway, and especially in the last two weeks when they ran so repeatedly to the man she never stopped expecting day and night but who, unfortunately, had failed to ‘call round’. Sometimes she woke from a dream to the sound of a Jeep, at other times, and ever more frequently, chiefly at home in the drawing room, she had a sudden feeling … it couldn’t be and yet … she had to turn round because she felt that someone—it was he!—was standing behind her, which didn’t mean that she was anxious about his absence, simply that ‘life was empty without him …’—a feeling entirely understandable in one ‘whose heart was full of love’. She waited for him morning, noon and night, and in her imagination she saw him as she always did, commanding a tank as it careered along, dignified, not moving a muscle, then putting his eyes to the binoculars hanging round his neck and ‘scanning the far horizon’ … It was this heroic image that flashed before her now, but dissolved like smoke when she heard someone ‘shuffling around’ the hall again, someone across whom she had quite definitely ‘drawn the veil of the past’, but who, nine days after Valuska’s fate had been decided, went out every day at precisely eleven in the morning, returning at about eight at night, to deposit an appeal on his behalf. This was really the only evidence she had that Eszter was still alive, that is apart from the occasional flushing of the toilet, the dull distant sound of the piano that had been taken through into the servants’ room, and the bits of news she was sometimes given about him: otherwise, it was as if he wasn’t there, as if his little lair had nothing to do with the rest of the house. Altogether she had seen him once or twice that fortnight, chiefly on the day of ‘the historically significant repossession’ of the house, and since her security arrangements by which the servants’ room was inspected each evening had always reported the same thing—the opened scores, the works of Jane Austen piled into two columns, and the occupant, that is if he was in, either reading (‘The sheer bloody boredom of it!’) or playing the piano (‘Bloody romantics!’)—she had put an end to them the day before. It was not only that he no longer presented any kind of threat to her, but because she ‘had not the slightest shred of interest’ in either his doings or his existence, and on the rare occasions she did think of him she was forced to ask herself, ‘Was this the force you triumphed over?’ Over this dummy, this fool, this ‘creaking wreck’ who, through his loyalty to that half-wit, had reduced himself to a mere shadow! Because that’s all he was, thought Mrs Eszter as she heard him shuffle down the hall, a feeble shadow of even his former self, a pitiful geriatric, a terrified rabbit, ‘a trembling old ratbag, whose eyes are always watering’, who, instead of shaking off the shackles of the very memory of Valuska, had got himself so wrapped up in his ‘fatherly’ feelings that he had forfeited the utterly incomprehensible respect in which he had been held and was now suddenly regarded as ‘a subject of general ridicule’. From the morning on which Valuska’s fate had been so reassuringly decided, instead of shutting himself away as before, he dragged himself through town, in full sight of everyone twice every blessed day—once at eleven when he went out, once, at about eight, when he returned—in order to sit in the Yellow House with the completely silent Valuska in his stripy gown (apparently he couldn’t bring himself even to open his eyes now) and, so people said, talk to him or, like a real headcase, simply sit in silence himself. There was no sign at all that ‘this living monument to the most humiliating defeat’ would ever come to his senses, sighed Mrs Eszter as she heard the distant noise of the gate eventually being closed, since this, no doubt, was what they would go on doing as long as they lived, much to the amusement of this town at the threshold of a new age, sitting silently beside each other, gently holding hands; yes, that is how it would most probably be, she thought as she stood up and started arranging the room for ‘the interview’, though it didn’t matter to her either way, for what harm could this tiny blemish in her past do to her current position, here ‘at the pinnacle’, and in any case she could bear this twice-daily ‘quiet, funereal procession’ down the hall, at least until she could find ‘an opportune moment’ to arrange a long-overdue quick divorce. She pulled the table and chair closer to the window so the ‘candidate’ should have no opportunity of ‘clutching at anything for support’ in the room, which was pretty bare in any case, and when, after a good minute (‘You’re late!’ Mrs Eszter frowned), Harrer appeared escorting the ‘soldier-to-be’, ushering him to the centre of the room, the latter, who had arrived confidently, with his chest puffed out, quickly, and according to plan, softened under pressure. He’s as strong as a bull, thought the secretary as she appraised him from behind the table, while, under the combined pressure of Harrer’s first, appropriately intimidating, questions and the ‘vulnerability’ of standing in the centre of the room, this ‘native of the Nile’, who was ‘stinking of booze’, gave up any appearance of ‘self-confidence’, at which point the woman in command of the situation took over and let it be known ‘by way of a little warning’ that this was no place for playing ‘pig-in-a-poke’ and that they wouldn’t waste time on ‘pub-crawlers’, and that he should listen very carefully to what she said as she would say it only once. Let there be no misunderstanding, she announced, her face as cold as ice, ‘the purpose of our interrogation is to decide whether we should throw you to the authorities straight away or whether we have any use for you’, but that the only way he could persuade them to the latter opinion was by giving a fully detailed and entirely accurate account of the events of ‘that’ night. That was the only way, she raised her index finger, since accuracy and copiousness of detail were ‘an earnest of his intention’ to become a useful member of society, otherwise he could go before the judge, which meant prison, and in cases such as his, this meant for life. He had absolutely no desire to go to prison, the interrogated man answered uneasily, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, especially as Vulture—he pointed to Harrer—had promised him there would be no problems provided that he ‘dished the dirt’. He hadn’t come to give himself up, ‘he wasn’t born yesterday’, there was no need for threats, he had come of his own free will to confess everything and would take them through events line by line, because, he said, as he scratched at a healing bruise on his chin, ‘he knew the score’; they wanted policemen, and he was here because he was fed up with the Nile. We’ll see what we can do, Mrs Eszter replied with a severe dignity, but first they wanted to hear whether he had committed any crime so serious that ‘not God himself could save you from the full force of the law’, and that once he had told them everything, ‘word by word, line by line’ then, and only then, would she, the secretary to the council, be able to tell whether she was in a position to help.